Saints row

Hitman Game Guide

By: Matthew Rorie Design: Randall Montanari

Introduction
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Hitman Game Guide

The Hitman series has been around for almost six years now, as they’ve followed the adventures of Agent 47, an uberprofessional cloned hitman that’s tasked with taking out the trash on behalf of theshadowy assassin’s guild known only as The Agency. His lifestyle has its ups and down, but in the end, he gets to kill people and hide their bodies for a living, which is good work if you can find it. Players familiar with the Hitman series will be right at home in Hitman: Blood Money, the latest installment in the series. In it, 47 is up to his old games as he throttles numerous innocents simplybecause he wants to steal their clothes in order to infiltrate off-limits areas and inject poison into cakes which he then places in front of large men with sweet tooths who then lick the icing and keel over dead. All in a day’s work for 47, really. Of course, the game also allows you to be as ruthlessly violent as you want; if you want to take things subtle and slow, you’re going to be able to, butif you just want to kill everything that moves with an automatic rifle, then you’ll be allowed to do that as well. Of course, finding the "proper" way to eliminate your foes in Hitman: Blood Money can be a process of trial and error...and error...and error. If you don’t fancy the prospect of reloading your savegames multiple times just to figure out the specific path that one of your targets takesthrough, then GameSpot’s Game Guide for Blood Money is here to help. In it, we’re going to give you specific tips to take on each of the game’s difficult missions, so enjoy.

General Tips
Most of the game's basic mechanics are explained in the tutorial, so we're not going to discuss every little thing here. We'll just give you a few of the oddities that we've noticed while playing the game.The Ranking and Reward Systems
The inner workings of the ranking and reward systems are a bit mysterious, even to someone who's been doing nothing but playing the game for a couple of weeks. We can say a bit about the way you'll be ranked when you finish a level, however, if you'd like to hear about it.

Rankings
When you complete a level, you'll be rewarded a rating title and bonus cash,depending on how well you performed your objectives. Although you can definitely approach each mission with a bloodthirsty vengeance, killing civilians and instigating mass slaughters on the populace of a level, the game discourages this kind of behavior by giving you less cash. On the flipside, if you manage to scoot through a level like a shadow, killing only your targets and escaping unseen, thenyou'll get more cash to spend on upgrades. The smallest amount of money you can get as a Ranking Bonus is zero dollars, which is your reward for getting a body count in the dozens and leaving plenty of witnesses to your activities. (Oddly enough, if you manage to kill everyone in a level, you actually get a token $1,000 reward.) The highest amount you can get is $150,000 dollars, awarded for thecoveted and difficult to obtain Silent Assassin ranking, which can apparently only be obtained if you kill only your specific targets (i.e. no bystanders or guards) in a minimum amount of time. Most of the time your ceiling will be $100,000 for the Hitman and Professional rankings. In general, if you want to obtain high rankings, and thus obtain more money at the end of each level, you're going toneed to keep your bodycount as low as possible, and definitely make sure not to be caught killing large numbers of people. Setting off a bomb that kills a dozen people is going to reduce your ranking, sure, but opening fire with an M4 and killing those same dozen people will reduce your score even further.

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